It was not long after the day I was speaking to Tam about the futility and frivolity of clinging to old worn-out relationships like sugar-ants on a desiccating chocolate donut that it happened. I woke up into a wet yet sunny afternoon with the joyful little sky preparing to shut down for the day. I usually am not a kind of a person who reflects upon fuzzy dreams over the first post-sleep cigarette; but this day was very different.
I couldn't actually remember what dreams I had during my un-mundane day-nap,—but there was something in the air, in the mirthful wet of the grass, in the ruddy glow of the retiring sun, and in my drowsy self—that made my heart a bit heavy. Not that I boast being an expert in dissecting these sleep-induced, or say, weather-induced, heart-heaves into their exact causes, but a lazy Saturday afternoon usually gives you all the time in the world to reach any level of inward enlightenment, if you understand what I mean.
To talk about inward enlightenment, along the lines I wished to direct the phrase, it is a painful confession that almost all mortal beings, knowingly or unknowingly, are extremely prone to misinterpret the idea. It is not all about the net-beans or coffee-beans that your office cubicle might stink of; it is not about meditation and all other practices that claim to help in this direction. It is also not about bestial satisfactions or about loneliness all the time. In fact, I dare say, it’s not an easy job to come down to a concrete conclusion about what it is all about.
Coming back to myself, I felt terribly guilty;—guilty of abstinence from things that only I felt unnecessary—guilty of being so selfish all the time. Selfish, I've really been throughout;— from the day I was born, may be;—may be from the day I fell in love for the first time. It is a weird statement—“fell in love”. It sounds like a sudden event that could be attributed to a specific time-frame (I admit that there is a whole majority of thinkers who believe that the sense and the sound of these words are well in accord). However to me it is a bit difficult to accept it that way. I would rather call falling in love, as the phrase goes, an idea rather than an event. And it is the very realization of this idea that gives you all the symptoms that Bollywood songs often remind you of. And it is the extent of your realization that takes you closer to or away from the other person (or object) involved in it, if at all it is involved.
I took a stroll down the pebbled walk by the lake. The fishing birds packing up for the day made the hustle of the breeze almost inaudible. I kicked on a pebble that was doing no harm to me, just like kicking on the maturing womb of a relationship. I could imagine how it might feel to one who mothers a relationship for so long just to find it dead at birth—an idea dying out before it is even realized—as if it was never meant to occur, but still somehow it had occurred like a parasite; how it feels to touch one’s lips and hope against hope, that you never part, just to part a moment later. When it comes to actions, making love is as easy or as difficult as saying “It’s not working. Let’s break up”. Both are all small realizations, meditated pituitary rushes, that symmetrically hold their rights to come in whenever you let them. At yet we don’t look at them indifferently, as if one is never meant to happen—as if ideas can never change.
I thought of an arrogant optimist who acted a happy man like all the rest of us. A man who lived for his own self; a man, who seldom clung to the ideas that faded—who never regretted having ended a relationship that was as harmonious as friendship—as supportive as the earth—as carnal as nature’s ways—and as pure as love itself;— a man who always smiled— and was always happy with life.
